Senate Republicans know very little about what their new health-care plan would actually do. This is because the bill’s primary author left the Senate in 2006, and the legislation he wrote has been public for all of eight days. “If there was an oral exam on the contents of the proposal, graded on a generous curve, only two Republicans could pass it,” a senior Republican aide told a reporter this week — before stipulating that the bill’s putative co-author, Lindsey Graham, was not one of them.

But you need not take an anonymous aide’s word on it. On Tuesday,Vox’s Jeff Stein asked nine GOP senators what problems the Graham-Cassidy health-care bill solves, and how it solves them. The lawmakers responded with platitudes about federalism, the phrase “read the bill and you’ll understand,” and a bizarre reference to the final scene of Thelma and Louise.

And yet, according to reports, at least 48 Republican senators are ready to vote for the bill next week. Which raises the question: Why is almost every GOP senator ready to vote for widely reviled legislation that they do not understand?

The popular answer is that they feel a political obligation to make good on their promises to the conservative base, regardless of the implications for public policy. Remarkably, several senators have stated, explicitly, that this is their calculus.

“You know, I could maybe give you ten reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered,” Iowa’s Chuck Grassley told reporters in his state Wednesday. “But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”

Senators are not supposed to support legislation that they believe to be unworthy of consideration on substantive grounds just because they promised their voters that they would support a bill of that general type. The entire point of having a republic — as opposed to a direct democracy — is that the former enables elected representatives to exercise independent judgement in policy-making.

Still, as contemptible as Grassley’s official rationale for supporting Graham-Cassidy is, his party’s actual motivation for pushing the bill is (almost certainly) more sinister. In truth, Graham-Cassidy does not fulfill the Republican Party’s promises to its voters — and there is virtually no evidence that said voters would punish the party for failing to pass it. The bill does, however, advance the priorities of the GOP’s big-dollar donors — and there is significant evidence that they would punish the Republican lawmakers if the legislation fails.

It’s true that Republicans have spent nearly a decade promising voters that they would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” But most Republicans specifically promised to replace the law with one that would make health-care benefits more generous and universally affordable. Our Republican president promised to preserve Medicaid in its current form and achieve universal coverage with lower deductibles. The mogul even went so far as to explicitly disavow the conservative movement’s traditional hostility to the welfare state, telling 60 Minutes, “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”

Trump wasn’t the only one singing such a tune. Virtually all of the GOP’s leading lights attacked Obamacare from the left, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who lamented in January, “There are 25 million Americans who aren’t covered now … And many Americans who actually did get insurance — when they did not have it before — have really bad insurance that they have to pay for, and the deductibles are so high that it’s really not worth much to them.”

McConnell, Trump, and their co-partisans pretended to support a more generous government health program for a reason: That is what most Republican voters want. Earlier this year, a Morning Consult survey found that a majority of conservatives — and a large plurality of self-identified tea-party supporters — thought that “the government should spend more on health care.”

Those findings are consistent with polling from Pew Research, which back in May found 61 percent of Republican voters saying that government funding levels for health care should be maintained or increased. Meanwhile, according to a recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 12 percent of all U.S. adults support cuts to Medicaid (which happens to be about the percentage of the public that supported the Senate’s previous Medicaid-gutting, Obamacare-repeal bill).

Graham-Cassidy would cut federal spending on insurance subsides and the Medicaid expansion by an estimated $243 billion between 2020 and 2026. That is neither what Republicans campaigned on, nor what their constituents want.

But it is what their most affluent donors want — or at least they believe it moves the ball in their desired direction. While Republican voters are broadly supportive of Medicaid — and many GOP senators from Medicaid-expansion states have touted their support for the policy — the conservative donor network funded by the oil billionaires Charles and David Koch has been unequivocal in its opposition to the federal program.

“Our network voraciously opposed Medicaid expansion in state after state,” Tim Phillips, head of the Koch-funded nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, told GOP donors at the Koch Network’s June retreat. “These Republicans who expanded Medicaid were flatly wrong. So we’re going to continue holding these Republicans accountable.”

At the same retreat, the Koch brothers themselves complained that the Republican health-care bill — which, at the time, already included significant cuts to Medicaid — was insufficiently conservative. That bill failed, amid widespread public opposition to its austerity. Senate Republicans responded by drafting a new iteration of Trumpcare that cuts Medicaid — and subsidies for health insurance — even more severely.

In voting for Graham-Cassidy, Republican senators might fulfill promises they made to Charles Koch in Colorado Springs. But most would actually be breaking their promises to voters. Multiple GOP senators pledged to vote against any bill that failed to preserve protections for people with preexisting conditions, address the opioid crisis, or reduce insurance premiums.

Graham-Cassidy fails to do all of these things. In fact, its scheme for block-granting federal health-care spending to the states is so haphazard and ill-thought-out, it would lead insurers to drastically increase their premiums, so as to protect themselves against market uncertainty.

The notion that Republicans need to pass a bill that will increase the cost of health insurance — and break a variety of substantive promises to their constituents — for the sake of political expediency is bizarre. The only evidence for this view is that Republican voters still support “Obamacare repeal.” But if GOP lawmakers want to vote for a health-care bill that breaks their substantive promises to voters — and call it “Obamacare repeal” — they have better options.

Days ago, Senate Democrats offered to support waivers that would allow red states to opt out of some Obamacare regulations, in exchange for funding to shore up the exchanges. This legislation would have averted a significant spike in insurance premiums next year — and, in keeping federal funding for health-care constant, it would have been closer to the substantive wishes of GOP voters than Graham-Cassidy is. What’s more, some Democrats were prepared to let President Trump call the measure “Obamacare repeal.”

There is no reason to believe that the GOP’s political interests would be better served by passing a radical bill that will increase health-insurance premiums than by passing a bipartisan one that will reduce them — unless one stipulates that doing the latter would alienate big-dollar donors. Trump voters overwhelmingly approved of the president’s bipartisan debt-ceiling deal — and independents appear to have been even more enthusiastic.

The GOP base is not allergic to bipartisanship and compromise, so long as it’s their champion who’s making the deals. But the Koch brothers are. The Kochs do not oppose Obamacare because the program doesn’t work well enough — they oppose it because they find it morally wrong for the state to take money from wealthy people and use it to subsidize health insurance for non-wealthy people. Thus, technocratic fixes that make government-subsidized health care work better are antithetical to their project. Their interest is not in improving the Affordable Care Act, but in discrediting the premise on which it is based: that redistributive government programs can improve health care for most Americans.

And the Kochs and their ilk have made clear that Republicans who buck them will face consequences. This week, NBC News’ Kasie Hunt tweeted, “Republicans heard loud & clear from donors this August that do-nothing isn’t going to cut it.” At the Koch retreat in June, at least one major donor threatened to close “the Dallas piggy bank” until repeal was passed. In August, one Republican donor responded to the apparent death of Obamacare repeal by actually suing the party for fraud.

Republicans don’t need donations from billionaires more than they need the votes of their base. But the former pay far closer attention to the details of policy. On fiscal matters, it is much riskier for Republicans to buck their donors than to betray the constituents who elected them.

Senate Republicans are on the cusp of radically reforming our health-care system in ways that they do not fully understand — and that industry stakeholders and GOP voters broadly oppose — out of fear that a few dozen obscenely wealthy libertarians will evict them from Congress if they don’t.

If Graham-Cassidy becomes law, our nation will enter a health-care crisis. But the fact that 40-something senators would vote for the bill, today, means that we have already entered a democratic one.

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THE FEED

26 mins ago

And yet we keep waiting

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”